Big Mother Is Watching You: Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton in 2009. (Official photo from Department of State page)

For our second installment of Big Mother Is Watching You, a guide to prominent anti-sex worker activists and officials, we’d like to remind you of a few salient facts about Hillary Clinton and her relationship to Somaly Mam, after the formal launch of Clinton’s second presidential bid on Sunday.

Post-criminalization in Cambodia, “raid-and-rescue” became the norm, and those conducting these brothel raids weren’t always the government. Seven prominent Western Christian aid organizations (Agape International Missions, Association for the Recovery of Children, Exodus Cry, Force Film Foundation, Hope for Justice, Love 146 and Shared Hope International), received no government funding yet performed rescues or otherwise collaborated with Cambodian law enforcement to detain sex workers. Some of these outfits would even solicit civilians to perform armed “rescues,” in effect becoming paramilitary organizations. These paramilitary operations by right-wing conservative Christian groups continued through Clinton’s tenure and into Kerry’s, supported by their positive reinforcement of the Cambodian government’s criminalization of sex work and receiving no censure from either administration. Famously, Nicholas Kristof participated in a brothel raid—which he live-tweeted—courtesy of Somaly Mam in 2011.

Hillary Clinton poses for a photo op here with Long Pros, a girl whom Somaly Mam coached to tell violent, trumped up tales of sexual exploitation to potential donors and journalists in the West, including a particularly lurid tale about her eye being gouged out by a brothel owner. This account appears to have been fabricated by Mam out of the surgical correction of a non-malignant tumor in Pros’ eye, as detailed in an article in the Cambodia Daily in October 2012. Pros appeared extensively in Nicholas Kristof’s “Half the Sky” documentary, which was released in October 2012.

Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the terrible policies of the Bush Administration, but she is responsible for following in lock-step with those policies during her tenure as Secretary of State under the Obama Administration.

Robin D has been involved with SWOP since 2008 and Prax(us) (now closed) since 2011. She's a big believer in "meatspace" collective activism, building community/community organizing, and coalition-building. She obsessively shares articles about sex workers' rights and other social justice issues, and can spend an embarrassing amount of time on the internet, which is both magical and poisonous.

5 COMMENTS

Hillary was ok on sex work back in the early 90s. Then in 1995 she came under huge fire from the US Christian Right who labeled her position on sex work at the Beijing Women’s Conference as “radical feminist” and used it to amp up their feminist and lesbian-baiting of her (which was big at the time). She conveniently switched tack and started touting anti-sex work BS…but interestingly, it was because sex workers’s rights was “too” feminist.

[…] particular attention to the ways in which Hillary the Hawk has actually undermined feminism. She rewarded states that violently criminalized prostitution when she was secretary of state, despite condemnation by major human rights organizations. With a […]